Historically, computer systems and databases have contained data in incompatible formats. As the organizations utilizing these systems and databases became more automated and computerized, the need to share data over computer networks, such as the Internet, became more and more prevalent. Due to this need, standard formats for the sharing of data were developed.
One such standard format developed is Extensible Markup Language (“XML”). XML is a very hierarchical data format, which includes a multitude of data structures having parent-child relationships. In the XML data format, the children of each parent may have further children, which in turn may have still further children, and so on. Due to the advent of this standard data format, many computer users have converted the aforementioned databases to the standard XML data format. The XML format also allows computer users to tailor their data to specific documents using schemas. Schemas provide mechanisms to define and describe the structure, content, and to some extent semantics of XML documents.
Along with the advent of the personal computer on the modern business landscape came many useful application programs including those utilizing electronic spreadsheets. Electronic spreadsheets typically operate on data contained in a matrix of cells comprising columns and rows. Generally, this data format is contained in a single table and is a very flat data structure in that the data is not maintained in hierarchical data structure utilized by XML.
With the ease of availability of the personal computer, many users have become proficient in their use and more specifically, in using electronic spreadsheet application programs. While electronic spreadsheets offer may advantages over prior conventional means, they also utilize a flat data structure. With huge amounts of data stored in hierarchical formats such as XML, the electronic spreadsheet with its flat data structure had no means to access this wealth of data, thus a means for accessing it with a spreadsheet has become desirable. While there are programs currently capable of converting XML formatted data into a spreadsheet, current programs fail to take into account the data relationships defined in schemas associated with hierarchical formatted documents. As a result, the display of hierarchical data contained in a document in a spreadsheet using current programs may be vastly different than the display intended by the author of the document.
It is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.